s of their maids, smothered with
bouquets, an hour before dinner. An operatic concert troupe, passing
through the nearest town, were diverted from their course by the slaves
of the ring to discourse hidden music in the music-room during dinner.
"Bite my finger, Sweetlips," said Miss Clara Wilson, who had a neat
taste for apt quotation, to Maruja, "that I may see if I am awake. It's
the Arabian Nights all over again!"

The dinner was a marvel, even in a land of gastronomic marvels; the
dessert a miracle of fruits, even in a climate that bore the products
of two zones. Maruja, from her seat beside her satisfied host, looked
across a bank of yellow roses at her sister and Raymond, and was
timidly conscious of the eyes of young Guest, who was seated at the
other end of the table, between the two Misses Wilson. With a strange
haunting of his appearance on the day she first met him, she stole
glances of half-frightened curiosity at him while he was eating, and
was relieved to find that he used his knife and fork like the others,
and that his appetite was far from voracious. It was his employer who
was the first to recall the experiences of his past life, with a
certain enthusiasm and the air of a host anxious to contribute to the
entertainment of his guests. "You'd hardly believe, Miss Saltonstall,
that that young gentleman over there walked across the Continent--and
two thousand odd miles, wasn't it?--all alone, and with not much more
in the way of traps than he's got on now. Tell 'em, Harry, how the
Apaches nearly gobbled you up, and then let you go because they thought
you as good an Injun as any one of them, and how you lived a week in
the desert on two biscuits as big as that." A chorus of entreaty and
delighted anticipation followed the suggestion. The old expression of
being at bay returned for an instant to Guest's face, but, lifting his
eyes, he caught a look of almost sympathetic anxiety from Maruja's, who
had not spoken.

"It became necessary for me, some time ago," said Guest, half
explanatorily, to Maruja, "to be rather explicit in the details of my
journey here, and I told Mr. Prince some things which he seems to think
interesting to others. That is all. To save my life on one occasion,
I was obliged to show myself as good as an Indian, in his own way, and
I lived among them and traveled with them for two weeks. I have been
hungry, as I suppose others have on like occasions, but nothing more."

Neve